Hey lemmings!
I wanted to share a quick update about our recent performance issues and how I have addressed them.
The last 24h have been a bit rough for lemm.ee.
Last night, I spent some time debugging federation issues with lemmy.world. We managed to significantly improve the situation - lemmy.world content is now reaching lemm.ee with a very high success rate - but this has had the effect of increasing incoming federation traffic on our servers significantly.
Additionally, we have been seeing steadily increasing normal user traffic over the past week, which is awesome from a community standpoint, but of course means that our servers have to do more work to keep up with all the new people.
To top things off, today there appeared a badly configured instance in the network, which was effectively launching a DoS attack against lemm.ee for several hours. Most likely it was unintentional, but unfortunately the end result was a sudden increase in our server load.
All these factors combined resulted in a really bad experience for most lemm.ee users today. Page load times have consistently been spiking into as much as 10 seconds or more for the whole day:
In fact, a lot of page loads just timed out with errors.
Fortunately, it seems I have managed to clear up the problems!
I have put a bunch of mitigations in place, and after monitoring the situation for the past hour, it seems that our performance issues have been resolved for now. So hopefully, you can enjoy browsing lemm.ee again without it feeling like torture!
Here are specific steps I took:
- I have doubled the hardware resources for our backend servers and database.
- I purchased a Cloudflare pro subscription for lemm.ee for 1 year. This took out a considerable chunk of my budget for lemm.ee, but in return it will allow me to analyze and optimize our cache usage to a far greater extent. I am already seeing vastly reduced load times for cacheable content (try opening https://lemm.ee a few times in a row as a logged out user - it should be blazing fast now!)
- I have configured a rate limiter which will prevent future DoS from the specific method that was used against us today.
Of course, all of the above is costly. Luckily, lemm.ee users have been very generous with donations in the month of June, and in fact a significant amount of donors have opted for monthly recurring contributions. This all gives me the confidence to increase our spending for now, and I am currently expecting to NOT increase my personal planned contribution of 150€/month, as the increased costs so far are entirely being covered by donations!
Let me take this opportunity to thank the sponsors who made the upgrades possible! All lemm.ee users are now enjoying better performance thanks to you, I could not have done it without you awesome people.
On a final note, I just want to say that I hope a lot of these issues can be solved by optimizations in Lemmy software itself in the future. I have been personally contributing several optimizations to the Lemmy codebase, and I know many others are focused on optimizations as well. Just throwing extra resources at the problem will probably not be a sustainable solution for very long 😅. But I am optimistic that we are moving in the right direction with the software changes, and we’ll be enjoying reduced resource needs before long.
That’s all I wanted to share today, I wish you all a great weekend!
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I’ve just joined up to lemme.ee and subscribed to a community on another instance. I can see the posts in that community, but they all show up with zero comments. If I view the community on the web, there are several comments there. Is this a bug?
The community is !nrl@aussie.zone
Just to add to the other reply, if there’s an old comment chain you really want to reply to you can grab the URL of the last comment, search for it through your home instance and that’ll force an index of the comment you searched for plus any parents.
It is a federation thing. Newly federated communities don’t load comments with their initial import. You’ll start to see comments as you go.
What was the actual issue with lemmy.world? And how was that particular item solved?
Hey, you can check this post for more context: https://lemm.ee/post/493966
Been browsing for a few days, decided to set up shop here, so to speak, upon seeing this.
Great work with this.
Agreed! I was hopping around trying to figure out how to choose an instance (and only somewhat understanding how the site works so far lol), but these super transparent posts and the effort clearly being put in to keep things running smoothly + be welcoming to reddit “refugees” is what made it easy to pick this instance to sign up on first! Thank you for all the hard work!! :)
Yo, I’m a simple Reddit refugee, just trying to figure out how to make my way in the fediverse, and I signed up to lemm.ee not long after this post went up. I honestly chose this instance on a whim, and after a bit of exploring and learning about how Lemmy works, boy does this post make me glad I landed here!
Thanks for running this instance, and for housing us reddit noobs :)
I have to admit I don’t really understand what you do, but I see some of your activities and I’m left feeling very impressed.
I’m not sure exactly what’s necessary to make this site and these federations actually turn into a fully fledged alternative and perhaps even a successor to “the old country”, and what mistakes to avoid becoming what made it turn worse. (I probably shouldn’t even involve myself in figuring that out.)
I am however sure that I am seeing you do a lot to make sure lemm.ee even has a chance. There is a lot of stuff blooming on here.
As a software engineer, this post convinced me to sign up for lemm.ee. So far it’s the most stable instance I’ve tried. I’ve seen a lot of questionable technical choices and messaging from other larger instances, but it seems like we’re in good hands here
Once again, thank you for making this small pleasant corner of the Internet possible!
Thank you for using your time and resources to create this space! Reading updates on server performance in main, gives me a tingly homey feeling I haven’t felt in a loooong time
here’s to everlasting lemmy.ee tingles 🍻
Thank you. I did notice when it got significantly faster.
I would like to see a create a sub for dummies video or post. I followed the link to create a sub, and I’m a dummy. I don’t get it. Once subs can be created easily, this community will grow much faster now that Apollo is gone. RIP
EAT my chode spez
I’ve not created any communities myself, but looking at the form it seems pretty straightforward. Is there a particular field that could be better explained, or are you getting some sort of error?
I have configured a rate limiter which will prevent future DoS from the specific method that was used against us today.
For those of us running other Lemmy instances, what should we be looking for?
While a generally a good idea, this information is better shared privately
Thank you for your work!
thank you king
Alrighty, I had a browse around and I’ve settled on lemm.ee + Jerboa and it’s looking good. Thanks for all your hard work handling the influx of reddfugees like myself. This gives me hope ❤️
Beehaw upgraded too. Lemmy.ml seems to be delivering none of the messages for past few hours, it is erroring constantly for a local user.
I joined this instance after reading this post. My inclination is to operate my own instance; but it seems best to wait until some of the dust settles and some of the bugs get discovered and fixed, first. The admins here seem capable of doing just that, while providing a stable platform.
